The Red Suit At Dad’s Funeral

Mom’s favorite color was red. It is not a complicated detail, but it mattered more than I understood for most of my life. She wore a red coat every winter, kept red geraniums on the porch rail that somehow survived every frost, and on the last good day she had, the day before the pain medication took the rest of her away from us, she told my father something I only learned about years later, from him, on a night neither of us could sleep. She told him she didn’t want her family wearing black for her. She said black was for people who thought love ended when the heart stopped. She wanted red. She wanted her children to remember that she had been loud and alive and impossible to miss, and she asked my father to make sure that somewhere, for the rest of their lives, somebody in this family kept wearing color instead of mourning like it was a job.

Dad couldn’t do it himself. He tried, for a while, wearing a red tie to the cemetery every year on her birthday, but mostly grief made him quiet and gray, the way it does to a lot of men of his generation. It was Chris who took it all the way. Chris, who was seven when she died and barely remembers her voice anymore, found his own way back to her through color, and by the time he was twenty five he had built an entire life around it.

My brother works as a children’s entertainer. He calls himself “Mr. Lucky” and for twelve years he has shown up at the pediatric wing of Garrison County Memorial in a rotation of absurd, joyful costumes, red most of all, making kids laughing through chemo ports and casts and the kind of fear no child should have to carry. He does birthday parties and county fair gigs on the side to pay his bills, because being the person who makes dying children laugh does not pay particularly well in a town our size, but he has never once, in all the years I’ve watched him do it, treated it like anything less than his life’s actual purpose.

Dad was proud of him. I want to say that clearly, because for a long time I was not, and I am ashamed of that now. I thought Chris’s job was something to be managed, something to explain away at dinner parties, a nice hobby that had gone on a little too long for a grown man. I did not understand, not really, until the day of that funeral, how deeply our father had understood what Chris was actually doing, and why.

Three years before Dad died, he married a woman named Beverly.